Do Not Read: Raf Is a Useless and Valueless Failed Experiment

Summary: raf: Raft without [T]erm is an experimental Raft variant. It does not persist currentTerm as a separate piece of state. Instead, a candidate reserves a log index when it starts an election, and that index becomes the leader term. This does not remove Raft’s logical time model. It only changes where the term is derived from in storage.

Declaration: This approach is just the same as saving terms in the separate first extra slot in the terms array. So it actually still stores the term and has no value at all. Please do not read this as a useful design; it is only a failed personal experiment.

Note: The idea in this article came from Zhang Yanpo. The code was implemented by Zhang Yanpo by hand. This article was drafted and refined with Codex.

Repository: raf (v0.1.1).

Introduction

I have seen a few interesting proposals that try to remove the term from Raft. The idea is appealing: if a consensus protocol can maintain one less piece of persistent state, perhaps both the model and the implementation become simpler. But Raft’s term is not just a counter. It represents logical time, lets nodes distinguish old leaders from new ones, and participates in Raft’s commit safety rule. So the real question is not whether we can simply delete the term. The useful question is whether we can express it in a different way.

The name raf comes from Raft without [T]erm. Here, “without term” does not mean the protocol has no term at all. It means currentTerm is no longer persisted as an independent field. The project turns this idea into a small but serious implementation: avoid storing currentTerm separately, while still giving every part of Raft that needs a term a reliable source of logical time.

This article explains that core idea. The term still exists as a concept. Logs are still compared by (term, index). What changes is the source of the term: it no longer comes from a separately incremented persistent counter; it comes from a log index reserved by an election.…